Many information processing systems and information display applications present image information on a graphical user interface. Examples of such information display applications include picture editors and the like. In applications operating with a user interface comprising a small display screen such as in a mobile device environment, or even in applications operating with a larger display screen by using a small display window area within the larger display screen, generally have a constrained display screen area that limits the amount of image information that can be presented to a user at one time.
Certain conventional picture editors (or image editors) allow a user to selectively crop a portion of an image displayed on a display screen. In some picture editors an image on a display screen can be rotated. Additionally, some picture editors allow changing the direction of rotation of an image on a display screen. This rotation is achieved in all these examples by rotating the image on the display screen beneath a fixed rectangular image frame. Typically a display screen, or a window in a display screen, is presented in a user interface as a rectangular form factor picture frame. An example of this is shown in FIG. 1 with an image in the fixed rectangular picture frame.
In some picture editors, this rotation can be problematic because, in performing the rotation of a displayed image, parts of the image being rotated are not displayed because they fall outside the fixed rectangular picture frame (or also referred to as “image frame”). This constraint can lead to important parts or details of the image being missed from the picture frame. In the example shown in FIG. 1, when the image is rotated left, as shown in FIG. 2, or rotated right, as shown in FIG. 3, parts of the originally displayed image are undesirably missed from the displayed fixed rectangular picture frame.
In other picture editors, rather than cut parts of the image out it is known to add corner sections (white or gray space) as shown in FIG. 4.
While rotating the image, especially at any angle other than 90 degrees, it is very likely that the rotated image either has undesirably added white/gray background space beyond the dimensions of the original image being rotated or the image is undesirably cropped. This is because the operational environment for these editors typically only stores image information in a rectangular matrix.
Therefore, there is a need to address these problems with conventional information processing systems and conventional information display applications that present image information on a graphical user interface and that allow cropping and rotation of displayed image information.